A Bulletin of Socialist Economic Analysis published by Ken Livingstone
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Monday, 4 May 2015

Can the Lib-Dems save Tory Britain?

By John Ross

By now many pollsters admit they misread the election
campaign. As Freddie
Sayers, You Gov’s Editor in Chief, put it: ‘Back in February, it was still
considered a near-certainty by the media pundits that the Conservatives would
end up significantly ahead. Ed Miliband was unconvincing, the economic numbers
coming in were all positive, and now the SNP were wiping out Labour in Scotland:
the Conservatives themselves felt a certain inevitability about their return to
power after May 7th.’

The election campaign has not turned out like that – the Tories
have not gained support. But an attempt has been to explain this by short term
factors such as Lynton Crosby’s distasteful election tactics or backlash
against the Tory media’s attempted character assassination of Ed Miliband. As Peter
Kellner summarised this analysis: ‘Tories pay the price of an inept
campaign’.

This view is wrong. History, including election campaigns,
is ‘natural selection of accidents’. Far more powerful forces than Lynton
Crosby, or David Cameron’s inability to accurately name his supposed favourite
football term, explain the failure of Tory support to rise.

To show the deep social processes explaining absence of the
anticipated Tory surge the graph below shows the Tories percentage of the vote at
every general election since the party’s highest ever score – 55.0% in 1931. The graph is breath-taking in the
steadiness of its decline.

Already after World War II the peak Tory vote was 49.6% in
1955 - lower than inter-war levels. It fell to 41.9% by 1992 - the last time the
Tories won a majority in the House of Commons. By 2010, when they had declined
to being the largest party, but without an overall majority of seats, Tory
support was 36.1%. Typically each Tory
victory was won with a lower percentage of the vote than the one before, each
Tory defeat saw the party’s support fall further than the one previously.

This process is produced by clear social trends. The modern
Conservatives originated in the South East of England, outside London, in the
mid-nineteenth century following the old Tory Party’s split over repeal of the
corn laws. Over nearly a century the Conservatives rose to become Britain’s
dominant party by adding, in chronological order, mass support in North West
England, London, the West Midlands and Scotland – the current Tory rump in
Scotland, with one seat, is in a nation where from 1945-55 Tories actually had
more support than England! The Tory decline was the progressive loss of first
Scotland, then North West England, then the West Midlands and London. Now the Tories are back in their original
South East bastion.

This trend, based on real elections not polls, was analysed
in 1983 in my book Thatcher and Friends and
has continued to operate since. It is such powerful forces, operating over more
than 80 years, which underlay the failure of Tory support to rise in the
election campaign.

Relentless historical Tory decline, of course, does not mean
there are no short term shifts. There is a swing factor of slightly under 5%
between a Tory victory and a defeat - explained by events nearer the time of an
election. But this is superimposed on an underlying erosion of the Tory vote of
slightly over 0.2% a year.

Taking these trends, if the Tories were the leading party on
7 May, they would get a bit under 35% of the vote, and if they were the losing
party they would get slightly over 30%. The problem is that with a maximum
theoretical 35% vote the Tories could not win an overall majority of seats. Failure
to analyse longer term social processes caused failure to foresee accurately the
course of the election.

Faced with these trends Labour’s policy has shown strategic errors
to a higher degree than anticipated. Labour should have understood Tory support
could not rise. The key for Labour was therefore to ensure the unity of its
moderate left support. Instead relentless minimisation of Labour’s difference
with the Tories during the Scottish referendum campaign, the positioning of
Labour to the right of the SNP, must count as one of the worst strategic
blunders in recent British politics. Without this Ed Miliband could be
practicing his victory remarks outside 10 Downing Street. Labour’s ‘steer
right’ policy also opened a space for the Greens in England. It is for these
reasons that it not impossible the Tories may get a bit over 34% as the largest
party, not slightly over 30% as the losing one.

But this does not alter the fundamental trend of Tory
decline. Basic social forces, not contingent mistakes, have blocked a rise in
Tory support in the election campaign. It is because the Conservatives are
incapable of halting their own decline that the paradox is… only the Liberal
Democrats can now save Tory Britain!